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433 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. [i] (1977)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0433 and id is 1 raw text is: PREFACE George Peter Murdoch's Ethnographic Atlas1 counts 892 ethnic groups living within the borders of nation-states in the world today. Most countries, indeed, have more than five major ethnic groups within their borders2 and less than a fifth are relatively homogeneous, that is, a single ethnic group makes up more than 90 percent of their population. Relations among ethnic groups are frequently conflictive: since World War II, the most common cause of violence involving states has not been external wars but internal ethnic conflict.3 The papers in this volume accomplish two purposes. First, they provide a cross-sectional look at some of the most pressing ethnic conflicts in the world today. Second, they demonstrate the increase in intellectual sophistication that recent analyses of such conflicts display. Several decades ago, in a volume such as this one, the authors would have been primarily concerned with two sets of issues: (1) minorities as potential nations;4 and (2) discriminations against minorities and the process of their assimila- tion. Both of these sets of issues are still with us. In recent years, the former process separated Pakistan from India, then Bangladesh from Pakistan. It now nurtures the secessionist movements among the Basques, Bretons, Scots, Nagas, Pakhtuns, Kurds, French Canadians, Georgians and the Muslim fringe nationalities in the Soviet Union, the drive for a home- land for Palestinian refugees, and it will trouble African politics for decades to come. The second set of issues is also still very much with us, for instance, Protestant versus Catholic battles in Northern Ireland, reactions to rising tides of immigration into Britain and OEC countries, apartheid in Rhodesia and South Africa, and, more generally, our rediscovered concern for human rights. The papers in this volume, while they also concern themselves with these two historical perspectives, deal with many other aspects of ethnic relations as well. The increase in the range of interest and the enhanced level of analytic sophistication displayed by these articles indicate how far research on this topic has come in the past two decades. The simplistic notions that the fitting outcome of ethnic self-determination movements must be the creation of a new nation-state or that the melting pot is the best solution-or, indeed, ever really occurred-have been abandoned. 1. George Peter Murdoch, Ethnographic Atlas (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1967). 2. Abdul A. Said and Luis R. Simmons, eds., Ethnicity in an International Context (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transactions Press, 1976), p. 10. 3. Ibid., p. 16. 4. For a prototypical statement equating ethnic conflict internationally with the drive for separate nationhood, see Louis Wirth, The Problem of Minority Groups in The Science of Man in the World Crisis, ed., Ralph B. Linton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945), pp. 347-72. 5. For a projection of this American perspective on ethnic relations onto the world scene, see Arnold M. Rose, The Comparative Study of Intergroup Conflict, The Sociological Quarterly, vol. 1 (January 1960), pp. 57-66. Rose's principal classification of countries is according to the degree of severity of discrimination against minorities.

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